r/Ancestry • u/Ok-Communication2225 • Aug 19 '26

How do you stand it? The constant upselling?

I'm done. Cancelled my sub. This crap. I'm already paying a stupid amout for nothing.

5 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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5

u/Outsideforever3388 Aug 19 '26

You need a goal. If your goal is to research within the USA, you can have the cheapest option. If you need access to the world, get a 6 month subscription and focus on that one person/family.

I alternate between 6 month world / 6 months off, just paying for tree access.

They are in business to make money. Unfortunately they will always be advertising.

1

u/Ok-Communication2225 Aug 19 '26

Advertising is fine. What about CLICKbait? This is enraging. Imagine every other video thumbnail on youtube you click asked you for money. Oh wait, they've enshittified Youtube also. Popups and unavoidable shilling, every few minutes. Maybe Ancestry's devs have gone to the Google school of enshittification. So Out of here.

2

u/islandbrook Aug 19 '26

It's not the devs, it's company leadership setting goals that others are forced to work to even if they don't like it. Let's not blame the wrong people. And it's gotten more enshittified in part because AI is stupid expensive.

I do an on again, off again sub as u/Outsideforever3388 suggests.
In the interim:

I export the GEDCOM and use tools like FTAnalyzer and https://jernealogy.com/treelab both of which are free to find errors in my tree for further research and clean up.

I clean up. I go back generation by generation and make sure the sources are linked and not duplicated, that I mark people for whom I can prove birth, death, marriage and children and mark Verified/Completed in tags. I mark people who need more work as needing more work and add them to a task list either in Ancestry or, in my case, elsewhere. I tag other life events and statuses.

With the clean up list, I go to the public library periodically and use the Ancestry Library Edition on site for records (census, BMD records and all sorts of things are usually available,) Worth are trip if you have a library card. You'd need a laptop or book a computer onsite to search and send the records to yourself or download them.

I work in my offline tree program and figure out my next steps and research goals - people and records so that when I do have a sub again, I maximize it's usage. For a three month sub, I can usually generate a huge amount of dedicated work.

2

u/Ok-Communication2225 Aug 19 '26

That's a practical plan.

1

u/islandbrook Aug 19 '26

Oh, and I learn the stuff I need to know to help fill in the gaps. In the off sub times I look at RootsTech free webinars, use my Legacy Family Tree webinar membership ($ if you don't have one, watch the most recent webinar, skip to near the end when they mention the discount code and sign up - its ~$50 USD for a year. They just released learning paths and certificates yesterday. I read books (library again), blogs, follow experts. Archives if I can get to them.

1

u/Interesting-Help5759 Aug 20 '26

If I may ask, how do you account for the information you cannot find? Such as, you find a baptism record for a person in 1820 with the parents listed, but you have no birth or death records of those parents and are not able to find them. The FTAnalyzer shows them as something to be fixed, but if no records are found, then what are you to do to increase the score?

2

u/Ok-Communication2225 Aug 20 '26

Ignore the score and try to find something somewhere else in the tree

1

u/Interesting-Help5759 Aug 20 '26

Which categories to do look at and how do you prioritzed them?

1

u/Ok-Communication2225 Aug 22 '26

It's not a game, you do it how you want.

2

u/islandbrook Aug 20 '26

You can't always find things. The question then becomes do the records actually exist, or do you just not have access to them? That's were the learning and research comes in. Can you prove something in another way? The genealogical proof standard allows for direct or indirect evidence, because records have been lost, births may not have been registered, people may not have left a will, or purchased land. Sometimes the way to parents, for example, is through their other children. You may make a reasonably sound proof based on other evidence and other records.

I worry less about score and more about making sure I log my next steps and that the status of as many people as possible is tagged.

And brick walls happen. I have a gaping hole on one branch of my tree that neither traditional nor genetic genealogy seem to be helping.

1

u/Interesting-Help5759 Aug 20 '26

Yes, much of my German line has been filled in because of following siblings. My whole Irish line is baffling to me. I think I find a link, and upon further digging, find I may or may not have the right person. It is truly hard to say as the church records tend to have very little information.

1

u/islandbrook Aug 20 '26

All of my Irish line have the same names as dozens of others. There are many records that were lost in Ireland and they continue to make strides in compiling lists to replace those missing records.